Bonded
by SCWLC
Summary: This story is actually complete. It's really more of a POV look at Tylendel's life in overview than anything else. Naturally it deals with suicide.


Title: Bonded  
Author: SCWLC  
Disclaimer: I own squat here.  
Summary: I . . . um . . . That's actually a good question. Tylendel's suicide I guess.  
Rating: R for safety.  
Author's Notes: I'm really not much one for writing Mercedes Lackey fanfics, but I had this idea and it wouldn't go away. I also don't know what the hell this is. So, write me a review and tell me. 'Cause this is really kinda weird. Even for me.  
  
Bonds are funny things. Whether lifebonds, Companion bonds or just strong emotional attachments between people they have interesting effects on the people who have them.  
  
Tylendel had always had a bond with his twin. It might have been an offshoot of sharing the same womb at the same time, it might have been the similarities and complimentary qualities of their personalities and it might simply have been an offshoot of his own magical gifts. Whatever the reason, the presence of his bond with Staven was something Tylendel took for granted. It was like the air or the earth. It simply was.   
  
He never questioned its presence. Never wondered what life was like for those who did not have such bonds. If closely questioned, he might have said something to the effect that he assumed everyone had something like that. As he grew older and learned that what he shared with his brother was unique, he still never investigated it. The hardships and emotional traumas that teach so many people the importance of being able to close off from others never occurred to him. He and his twin were so close though, they might well have been the same person in two bodies.  
  
One day, a difference reared its head. Tylendel discovered that he was different from his brother in many fundamental ways. He was mage gifted. His brother was not. He held those indefinable qualities that led a Companion to choose him. His brother did not.  
  
He held no feelings for girls save that they happened to be people he might be friends with. The same most definitely could not be said of his brother.   
  
Suddenly, too, there was a new bond. That of a herald and his companion. It was a glory and a wonder. Gala looked into his heart and loved him. They had shared no history, no experience, nothing until the moment she told him he had been Chosen. Tylendel found himself with two bonds, pulling him in opposing directions. Staven's trust and love demanded his twin's loyalty to the family and to himself. Gala needed him to break the ties that held him to his family. To his brother.  
  
He did the only thing he could. He hid his bond with Staven from his beloved Gala and prayed nightly that she would never know. Time passed and both bonds were nurtured and grew. Tylendel learned harsh lessons from the Collegium of trust and love, but they never touched upon those bonds most dear to him. In time, he came to wonder at the space Gala filled in him. It was a space he had never known he had before.  
  
In time, it became one with his surroundings. No more to be commented upon than his bond with Staven. Perhaps she noticed, perhaps not. Gala loved him with all her heart as he did her. For all that he betrayed the trust she placed in him by nightly reaffirming his bond with Staven and doing precisely the things that were the reason Staven was not Chosen alongside his brother. He did not believe it a violation, partly because he would never leave her anymore than he would Staven, perhaps partly because the older bond was as much a part of him as his hair and nails.  
  
One day a new bond came into his life. He had made friends amongst the trainees and teachers at the Collegium, but this was different. Vanyel Ashkevron gave him something that he had never found anywhere else. Suddenly there was another gaping hole in his life that was filled. Another hole he never knew was there.   
  
Oh there had been inklings of it as he watched the others pair off around him. People who gazed deeply into one another's eyes and spoke of devotion and love. But he was never lonely and truly, companionship of the romantic kind wasn't necessary to lead a reasonably happy life. Then his lifebond appeared and the slender, dark-haired boy with no bonds and so little joy in his life became the centre of his world.   
  
Vanyel was everything that Gala and Staven were not. He was not strong, confident or ethereal. He was beautiful, true, but Tylendel saw the way that beauty and delicacy was his lover's curse and not gift as it was for the Companion. And it was so nice to be needed. Vanyel needed him in a way that Staven and Gala did not. For, although the companion bond, if broken, might wound Gala deeply, perhaps even kill her, until she Chose him she was doing fine. Staven had a life that grew more separate from Tylendel's daily and he had less and less time for his trainee brother. Vanyel, on the other hand, had nothing but one sister to guard his heart. And now Tylendel.  
  
The third bond, so different from the elder two, was perhaps the only one that was never taken for granted.   
  
And then Staven died and the earth beneath his feet fell away and the skies vanished. Nothing was certain anymore and Gala's bond, so like that he held with Staven was too called into question. How long before his total existence was called into question and he turned out to be as ephemeral as the bond that had been his touchstone?  
  
Perhaps this doubt was why he did not call on her. Perhaps it was merely the pragmatism of knowing she would tamp down the fires of vengeance when he wished them to burn hottest. Instead he reached for the newest bond in his life. One he trusted implicitly because his lifebond trusted him so implicitly. He could do no wrong in Vanyel's eyes, and thus Vanyel would do whatever was asked of him.  
  
Including the breaking of every single principle held dear by the Heraldic community and, by extension, Gala.   
  
In his fury and grief he pulled away from the one who could best understand his grief and turned to the one who could only understand his anger. Together they plotted revenge on the family that arranged the pain that held Tylendel in its grip. When the portal opened and he looked through it, seeing those people so joyful in the face of his pain, there was no chance of turning back. No more chance than Gala had all those years before when she Chose so unwell. Everything he was Chosen for was gone in an instant of betrayal. He could not be a true Herald because he was forever first his twin's brother.  
  
With that, the gaping hole left by his brother's death was torn further open by a severed bond between Herald and Companion. For the first time in his life Tylendel was alone. So many years of unconsidered and assumed companionship were as though they never existed.   
  
The bonds which were as much part of himself as his limbs and mind, as much part of his world as the world itself, vanished and took the world with them. The darkness of the night stole his vision, the screams of those he would have slaughtered combined to a roar in his ears that blocked all other sounds in inarticulate white noise. Unaware of all that was around him, his lifebond trapped in trance and the gate, Tylendel knew only that he needed the pain to cease, for the cries in himself to be silenced.   
  
It was all because of the bonds.  
  
They are funny things. 


End file.
